Noah, what it is is simply a different service. I subscribe to Netflix because I can watch stuff I want to watch without having to sit through ads. Full stop. That's the service I'm buying. If Netflix starts pushing ads, they have stopped selling the service I want to buy. If they jack up the price without ads, and it's not an unreasonable hike, I'll pay it, because I like the current service. And you are wrong that ads aren't an inherently evil business model. They very much are: the point is to get you to do something that is against your interests. It's like when you ask a girl if she wants to go out with you, and she says no, and you keep asking her hoping she'll give in. Not cool.

More to the point, I would not pay for Netflix with ads. Netflix is quite reasonably priced at the moment. If they needed to charge more to avoid using ads, I would be okay with that. Of course they could charge sufficiently more that I wouldn't be okay with it, but I don't think they need to. The whole reason I use Netflix instead of TV is that I despise ads. HBO Now's advertising before each GoT episode really pisses me off, and makes me not want to use the service.

Hmm, my mistake - the ramjet does appear to predate Doctor Bussard considerably - clearly my avionics history is lacking.

On the other hand, Arthur C. Clarke credits "L'Autre Monde: ou les États et Empires de la Lune" (1657) as both being the first example of rocket-powered space flight and for inventing the ramjet. Though I would imagine they probably discussed something similar to a conventional ramjet, fusion having not yet been imagined. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramjet#Cyrano_de_Bergerac)

Not to mention that the Internet was started by the government. And companies like Lockheed Martin rely almost completely on government military subsidies. This article was a hit piece. The American media really is shockingly corrupt.

No, it's been shown that one particular hypothetical design based on one particular set of assumptions would not be viable. Not that the fundamental concept is flawed. There's a post a few pages up that gives more details.

No, I'm pretty sure it's the other way around - there's now a real jet which adopted the name of a theoretical fusion engine that had been designed decades before.

Immortality is only available to individuals who have been permanently sterilized before having children. Your choice - you can strive for immortality personally, or through your children, but not both.

Of course enforcement would be an issue...

Nope. Cosmic radiation is pretty much continuous. What's (relatively) rare is the ridiculous high-energy radiation, such as a single photon carrying mass-energy equivalent to an entire iron atom. Our planet is still presumably getting bombarded by them near constantly, but they're rare enough that it's uncommon for them to hit the few particle detectors we have capable of recording them.

Actually, I believe current research suggests that there may be a link between cosmic rays and cloud formation - it's actually one of the current areas of genuine controversy in climate science. The caveats being:
1) The effect is relatively small - to the point of being virtually invisible until you have modeled the many stronger influences with sufficient precision.
2) It has nothing to do with Global Warming, as the direct measurements of cosmic ray levels have been basically unchanged in recent decades.

Of course, the link between clouds and temperature is even less straightforward. As I recall the research suggests there is only a very small effect on average temperatures, though there is a dramatic effect on the diurnal variation - cloud cover tends to stabilize temperatures, causing slower heating during the day, but also slower cooling at night.

Nah, there needs to be an intelligent species present at both ends of the desired wormhole in order to coordinate its creation. So far no such species exists in the Sol system.

Ah. Of course. Absolutely. Nice catch. I look forward to the day when high-capacity flywheels become cost-competitive with chemical batteries. But I'm not holding my breath.

But the gradient won't be across a dozen kilometers - in fact if it were then the vast majority of the vented CO2 would be lost to interplanetary space rather than getting anywhere close to Mars. To be effective this system would have to be designed to resist a laminar flow distribution, so that virtually all the gas leaves the funnel at *exactly* the same speed. Any molecule moving at a speed off by even 0.001% will never reach Mars. We're trying to throw a dart at a bullseye moving at 24.1 km/s, hundreds of millions of miles away, with zero possibility of fine-tuning the path after launch.

As a matter of fact, even the initial thermalized lateral motion of the gas molecules would pretty much render it impossible to hit Mars - We're talking months to years of transition time, even a few dozen m/s of lateral motion will cause the gas cloud to expand so rapidly that I doubt more than a tiny fraction of a percent would even make it to Mars's Hill's sphere, much less the planet itself. You would have to find a way to completely eliminate all thermalized motion, essentially creating a giant highly collimated particle accelerator with negligible inter-molecular interactions rather than an air gun.

I hope you sized the wires right. Lower voltage means higher amperage, and while the math isn't quite this simple, the general rule of thumb is that you want the same gauge wire for the same amperage for 24v vs 115v. So if you use the 10a 115 volt wire for a 40a 24 volt circuit, you are likely creating a fire hazard if you actually draw that much power on the circuit. This is why 24 volt wiring is more expensive (in addition to economies of scale, of course). Losses for low voltage DC over longer runs are also quite significant. This is a factor even if you are using 110 for power and an AC-to-DC converter to run a string of LED lights: you need to make sure the supply lines for the lights are sized correctly.

So I think that you are actually putting your life at risk here if you are sizing your wires on the basis of watts rather than amps. I would recommend that you take a much closer look at this.

This is a load of hooey. Low-voltage wiring is a PITA, and losses due to conversion aren't as high as is being claimed. The loss from just charging the battery is bigger. I'm afraid we are stuck with 120/240 VAC, and Tesla is the winner.